Contents

Plot[edit]

Gary King, a middle-aged alcoholic, tracks down his estranged schoolfriends and persuades them to complete "the Golden Mile", a pub crawl encompassing the 12 pubs of their hometown of Newton Haven. The group attempted the crawl as teenagers, but failed to reach the final pub, The World's End.

Gary arrives in Newton Haven with friends Peter, Oliver, Steven, and Andy. The group is briefly joined for a drink by Oliver's sister Sam, whose affections Gary and Steven fought over in school. In the toilets of the fourth pub, Gary picks a fight with a teenager and knocks his head off, exposing him as an android. Gary's friends join him and fight more androids, whom they refer to as "blanks".

Several pubs later, the group runs into Sam again. After Gary saves her from twin androids impersonating her friends, she is convinced of the androids' invasion. At The Mermaid, androids impersonating attractive girls from their youth attempt to seduce the men. At the next pub, Guy Shepherd, their old schoolteacher, encourages them to accept their fate and be replaced by androids. Andy realises that Oliver has been replaced with an android. Another fight breaks out and the group scatters.

Once reunited, the four remaining friends accuse each other of having been replaced by androids, but prove their humanity. The androids close in on the group and capture Peter, but Gary is determined to finish the pub crawl. After having a drink at the other two pubs along the way, he runs towards the final pub, the World's End. Andy abandons Steven and chases Gary through the streets.

At the World's End, Andy confronts Gary. In the quarrel, Andy realises that Gary attempted suicide in the years since school. As he tries to stop Gary from drawing his final pint, they discover a hidden chamber and are reunited with Steven. A disembodied alien entity, the Network, reveals that the limited android invasion has been responsible for all of humanity's advances in telecommunications in recent decades, bringing humanity closer together as a first step to joining the galaxy's community of planets. The Network offers the men the chance to contribute to Earth joining the galactic community, even offering them eternal youth by becoming androids, but they refuse. Exasperated, the Network abandons the invasion. Sam arrives to drive the group out of Newton Haven as it self-destructs.

Some time later, Andy recounts this story around a campfire in the ruins of London. The destruction of Newton Haven triggered a worldwide electro-magnetic pulse that wiped out modern technology and set humanity back to the Dark Ages. The remaining androids have reactivated and are mistrusted by surviving humans. Andy's marriage has recovered, Steven is in a relationship with Sam, and android versions of Peter and Oliver have returned to a semblance of their former lives. In the ruins of Newton Haven, the now-sober Gary enters a pub with the younger android versions of his friends and orders five glasses of water. When the bartender refuses to serve androids, Gary draws a sword and leads his android friends into a brawl.

Development[edit]

The World's End began as a screenplay titled Crawl about a group of teenagers on a pub crawl; it was written by Edgar Wright at the age of 21. He realised the idea could work with adult characters to capture "the bittersweet feeling of returning to your home town and feeling like a stranger".[8] Wright said he wanted to satirise the "strange homogeneous branding that becomes like a virus", explaining: "This doesn't just extend to pubs, it's the same with cafés and restaurants. If you live in a small town and you move to London, which I did when I was 20, then when you go back out into the other small towns in England you go 'oh my god, it's all the same!' It's like Bodysnatchers: literally our towns are being changed to death."[9]

In an interview for Entertainment Weekly, Pegg told Clark Collis, "People think we choose the genre first every time, and it's not true. We find the stories first. The notion of alienation from your hometown taken to its literal conclusion was how we got to science fiction."[10]

After the story was complete, Wright and Pegg examined a list of real pub names and "tried to make them like tarot cards" to foreshadow the events of the story. Wright explained: "So we said, 'OK this one's the Famous Cock, because this is where Gary is trying to puff up his own importance.' ... We did go through work out in each one how the pub sign was going to relate."[9]

Production[edit]

The Gardeners Arms pub on the boundary of Letchworth was used as the shooting location for the final pub, the World's End

All twelve pubs in the film use identical signage on menus and walls, reflecting what Wright called "that fake hand-written chalk" common to modern British pubs.[9] The exteriors of the real pubs were shot at locations in Welwyn Garden City and Letchworth Garden City, with altered signage.[14]Letchworth Garden City railway station got a makeover as the "Hole in the Wall".[15] Stunts were coordinated by Brad Allen of martial arts film director Jackie Chan's team. Wright said: "In Drunken Master, Jackie Chan has to get drunk to fight, but this is more the idea of Dutch courage. You know, when you're kind of drunk and you think 'ah, I can climb up that scaffolding!' Or just that you're impervious to pain. One of the things we talked about is this idea that [the characters] become better fighters the more oiled they get."[9]

The Broadway Cinema, Letchworth, a renovated independent cinema built in a quintessentially Art Deco style in the 1930s,[16] was used to portray the Mermaid pub. This cinema was also the first outside London to play the film, with a special introduction by Pegg thanking the residents of Letchworth for their help during its making; over 800 viewers watched the film at the cinema on its opening night.[17]

The film uses what the New York Post '​s Kyle Smith called "a brilliant Madchester soundtrack",[18]alternative rock and pop music from the time of the characters' adolescence. Wright explained: "A lot of those songs are ones that really hit me and Simon hard when we were that age... [Gary] is still living by those rules. It's like he decided to take 'Loaded' and 'I'm Free' to heart and thinks the party's never going to end."[9]

The soundtrack for the film was released on 5 August 2013 in the UK and 20 August 2013 in the United States, with the film's score, composed by Steven Price, released on the same day.

Release[edit]

The World's End premiered on 10 July 2013 at Leicester Square in London[21][22] and was released on 19 July 2013 in the United Kingdom.[21] It was released in the United States on 23 August 2013.[23]

Reception[edit]

Box office[edit]

The World's End earned £2,122,288 ($3,242,064 USD) during its UK opening weekend, losing the top spot to Monsters University. Its weekend grosses were higher than Shaun of the Dead '​s £1.6 million but lower than Hot Fuzz '​s £5.4 million.[24]

In the United States, the movie was released on 23 August and earned $3.5 million on its opening day, beating out The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones and You're Next. The World's End also had the highest per-theater average out of all films in theaters throughout the country on its opening day.[25] On its opening weekend, the film landed in fourth place with $8,790,237, behind Lee Daniels' The Butler, We're the Millers, and The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones.[26] This exceeded box office expectations ranging from $7 million[27] to $8.5 million,[28] and The World's End's opening weekend earned the most out of all films in the Cornetto Trilogy.[29]

Critical reception[edit]

The World's End received critical acclaim. The review aggregatorRotten Tomatoes reported an 89% approval rating with a weighted average score of 7.4/10 based on 189 reviews. The website's consensus reads, "Madcap and heartfelt, Edgar Wright's apocalypse comedy The World's End benefits from the typically hilarious Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, with a plethora of supporting players."[30] The film also holds a Metacritic score of 81 out of 100, indicating "universal acclaim", based on 45 collected reviews.[31]

Chris Nashawaty of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a B+, praising it as "hilarious" and the "best" collaboration of Wright, Pegg and Frost, saying that "these pint-swilling Peter Pans also know how to work the heart and the brain for belly laughs... The finale is a little too shaggy and silly. But what do you expect after a dozen beers?"[32] Mark Dinning of Empire magazine gave the film four stars out of five, writing: "Bravely refusing to rigidly adhere to a formula that has been so successful, Wright, Pegg and Frost's Cornetto Trilogy closer has tonal shifts you won't expect, but the same beating heart you've been craving."[33] Movie blog eatpraymedia gave the film four and a half stars, calling it "...the perfect antidote to big budget movie making."[34] Henry Barnes of The Guardian gave the film four stars out of five, writing: "With this final film they've slowed down a bit, grown up a lot. And saved the richest bite until last."[35]